


The Art of Adoption

by miramei



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Mewtwo as a cat, POV Second Person, cats adopt YOU, you don't adopt cats
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 11:47:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13833615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miramei/pseuds/miramei
Summary: "Local lady adopts world's strongest Pokemon, thought it was the weirdest cat she had ever seen."In your defense, you had never raised Pokemon before.





	The Art of Adoption

On a sunny Saturday morning right on the cusp of spring, you open your front door to pick up the newspaper and your delivery of MooMoo Milk, and end up having a stare-down with the strangest cat you have ever seen.

Calling it a stare-down is a bit of a stretch, actually. For one, it’s not even on your small sliver of patio, which is a humble step and a half down from your door. The weird cat is huddled in the hedges just off to the side of your tiny pocket of a yard. It’s so large that it’s poorly hidden, and its coat is such a color that it is a horrendous camouflage amongst the evergreens and tender new growth. It sits stiffly in the shrubbery and blinks large eyes at you, and you stand just inside your door in your pajamas, staring blankly back at it.

“Oh,” you say, and shuffle back inside.

The first dish you get your hands on is the one with the thick leaf-printed strip around the edge, the only one that hadn’t tragically broken in transit when your aunt had moved house and asked if you wanted any of her extensive dishware. It is clean, thankfully, and you grapple with the art of balancing half in and half out of your doorway, dish in your lap as you pick up one of the glass bottles. You must be a right sight, hair a mess in your paw-print jammies, vigorously shaking a bottle before fighting to peel off the cap so that you can carefully pour out a measure into the bowl. The strange cat watches you warily as you inch down the one-and-a-half step and then stretch out as far as you can dare without tripping flat onto your face to place the dish on the outer edge of the paved stone.

You give it a half smile for reassurance before you take your opened bottle and the rest of the milk delivery and head back indoors.

The next time you shuffle past the door, you notice that the dish is empty. The weird cat is back in the hedges, but now seems to be alternating a very forlorn look between your door and the empty dish. It’s… well, it’s oddly adorable, which probably falls in line with what you’d expect from the weirdest cat you’d ever seen in your bushes. You pop back out to pour the remainder of the opened bottle into the dish and then continue on to brush your teeth.

You make it a goal to scoot past your door between every other morning task, and that’s how you end up pouring three whole bottles worth of frothy MooMoo Milk into this dish for your visitor. You suppose that that’s as good a sign as any to turn your weekly order into a twice-weekly one, and shake the latest empty bottle good-naturedly at where you can see the weird cat’s equally weird tail poking out. The tip twitches and the branches rustle while it blinks at you. It must be a cat thing, this blinking.

When you finally remember the paper that you never picked up, the dish is licked clean once again, and your guest is nowhere to be seen.

 

 

It’s really easy to call the delivery company and ask for an additional delivery to be made to your door on Wednesday mornings. You only hope that the weird cat doesn’t consistently drink 3 bottles a day, because then there won’t be enough milk for _you_ by then. But that’ll be a problem that you’ll deal with on Tuesday. You’re not even sure if the weird cat will show up again, anyway. This might just be a one-time thing.

Maybe you were too hasty with the additional order.

(You don’t cancel it. Whether out of pride or hope, you can't say.)

You run a load of laundry because it’s the weekend. You give the house the well-deserved cleaning it didn’t get during the week. Then you take the blessedly short walk to Fuchsia’s Safari Park, where you pick up a pamphlet advertising the local flora and fauna and meander down the trails. Nothing in the “regular visitors” section jumps out at you for being your morning visitor, so you stop to talk to the park warden who tells you that sometimes they get exotic Pokémon either from migrations or because some Trainer or another releases them here. The warden assures you that if it’s a new resident in the park you’re bound to see it again. It’s one of the perks of living right down the block.

You drop a generous amount of change into the donation box and amble along home, but not before buying a cup of feed for the Goldeen who congregate by the last bridge out of the park. As you toss them handfuls of the little pellets, you hope that nobody had abandoned the poor thing. True, it was quite large (for a cat), and the bits of it that you could see poking out of the hedge had been a bit weird (for a cat), but looking weird and being big are terrible reasons to turn anyone out into the cold.

You break the waffle cup into small pieces and toss them in, clapping appreciatively along with a small child and her mother when a Seaking does an impressive leap out of the water to snatch the biggest piece out of the air.

When your sister calls you that evening, you give her a stern talking to about properly caring for her Pokémon, and make her promise that she’ll pass the message along to your brother. This she does, looking entirely bewildered, and when that’s all done and taken care of you snuggle more comfortably into your couch cushions and prompt her to tell you about Kalos. She lights up like the lights of the Prism Tower in the postcard she sent you over New Years, and you coo dutifully over her brand new, perfectly healthy, and wonderfully happy Sylveon.

 

 

The weird cat doesn’t show up on Sunday. It also doesn’t show up on Monday as you’re rushing about your flat getting ready for work. You set out a dish of milk for it anyway, because you didn’t do it yesterday and you feel horrible about it, but then there’s no time so you’re jamming your feet into your heels and rushing off to head to the office. When you get back, the dish is clean, and you can only hope that it was the weird cat that had come by and not some neighborhood scoundrel of a Vulpix or someone else from the Safari Park.

Not that you’d mind, you amend later, when you’re making dinner and feeling inexorably guilty. You won’t discriminate. Everyone deserves a dish of cold creamy milk. You just really wanted this weird cat that you’ve only seen once in your entire life to have it more than you’d want the neighbor’s perfectly cared for Vulpix to. You’re making a creamy chicken and rice casserole, because it is easy and delicious and will produce enough leftovers to take care of your lunches for the rest of the week, and it’s when you’re crossing the living room to turn on the telly that you look out and spy the strange cat. It’s back in that same bush, awkwardly sticking out like the sore thumb it is, barely illuminated in the waning light.

You grin without even knowing why.

You put out another dish of milk, lingering on the slip of patio for a minute while you think. “There’s a casserole that’ll be out of the oven soon, if you want to stick around a bit. Would you like some of that?” It feels weird to be talking to a Pokémon like this. You’ve never done it before. You’ve never been this close to a Pokémon that _wasn’t_ your parents’ perfectly lazy old Delcatty, and he was more living pillow than cat.

Like before, it blinks its large eyes quietly at you, and you take that as an agreement, even as you realize that if it doesn’t eat it, someone else will. It doesn’t stop you from feeling silly when you come out later with a steaming dish of chicken and rice and tell the conspicuously hiding cat to “be careful—it’s hot!” though.

 

 

You and the weird cat fall into a strange sort of pattern in the following few weeks. It shows up every other day in the early morning, sitting in that same bush, waiting patiently for you to put out a dish a milk. It makes a reappearance in the evenings, where you’ll put out another dish a milk accompanied by a dish of whatever you’ve made for dinner (it seems to be partial to your casseroles). On Saturdays it hangs out a bit longer and dutifully polishes off 3 bottles of milk before managing to vanish in the blink of an eye.

It’s a pretty comfortable routine, odd as it is.

You could get used to this.

 

 

By the time April rolls in, Fuchsia City is filled to bursting with cherry blossoms. It’s a beautiful sight, and one of the major regions you moved out here from your equally beautiful hometown of Cerulean. Your parents come by to visit, and even your brother drops in as a surprise halfway through. You all call up your sister and listen to her whine about how she misses “these stupid flowers” while holding the display up to a particularly beautiful tree. Your mother cooks up a storm and uses all the dishes you own, which ends up working out because the strange cat never shows up for the entirety of your family’s visit.

It’s only been a little more than a month since you first saw it in the hedges, but you miss it already.

When you see it sitting back in its regular bush the day after you send your family off, you are relieved. “I missed you,” you tell it, and are surprised by how much you mean it. It tips its head at you, and even tolerates you lingering on the patio for a while before it gets antsy to eat and starts whapping its tail against the grass. You retreat, and give it space.

Now is finally the opportunity for you to really take the chance to look at your favorite weird cat. It’s still hideous against the hedge, with its dark lavender tail and white-lavender body. Just a faintest ruffle here and there betrays the fact that it has fur, close-cropped and super sleek. It looks like it would be velvety soft against your fingers.

You wonder if you’ll ever be able to touch it.

Its haunches are large and powerful, and look far too big for its body. Only its hind paws really look like cat’s paws; its front paws have three little circular toes. It can apparently lift up the dishes to lick happily at the food with relative ease with them. It’s clearly a very talented cat. Its ears look more like little horns, and there’s a strange tube-like structure protruding from the back of its skull and reconnecting down behind its shoulder-blades. Its eyes are big and bright, and intelligent enough for you to wonder if this cat is a Psychic type. It’s giving you some Espeon-like vibes.

Not for the first time, you wonder what kind of cat this is, exactly, before shrugging. The world is a large place. Your sister has a dog that’s literally covered in ribbons. Your brother’s horse is on fire. There’s probably some island out there where more of these strange cats are native.

You say goodnight through the glass and head to bed, and in the morning, there are two clean dishes on the patio and a new delivery of milk by your door.

There’s also a tiny bouquet of zinnias, looking suspiciously like they’ve been plucked from the garden of the neighbor down the way. They’re beautiful, though, and you can’t _prove_ that they’re the neighbor’s zinnias, so you scoop them up and make a new home for them on your kitchen counter.

You think, maybe, just a little, your weird cat missed you too.

 

 

June marks the beginning of the rainy season, and you’ve set up an umbrella on the patio to attempt to shelter the dishes. By the second night it’s clear that this isn’t going to work in the long term, and so you lie in wait just inside your door for your cat to show up again.

It looks—understandably—very confused as it slinks into its bush and sees you framed in the glow of your kitchen lights.

“I don’t think the umbrella is a very feasible method to keep up through the entire rainy season,” you tell it. When its sodden ears droop in disappointment you feel bad and have to swallow hard in order to plow on. “So why don’t you come inside? We’ve been seeing each other for several months now and I’d like to think we’re pretty close. It’s warm and dry in here. I’ve got comfy cushions and fluffy towels.” You pat the tiled floor next to your leg gently in invitation. “And I promise I don’t snore.”

It eyes you warily, and it reminds you so much of when you first met it that your heart sinks. Maybe it’s harder to befriend a Pokémon than you thought. Your siblings had always made it look easy, so you had been _presumptuous_ and _presumed_ and—

You perk up hopefully as the weird cat takes one tentative step forward, then another. It’s pretty impressive how it manages to effortlessly keep itself so low to ground with its clearly longer hind legs. You nod and tap your fingers encouragingly on the floor as it slinks across grass, over the cobbles, and hesitantly up the one and a half steps.

“You made it!” you say, and immediately get a face-full of water as it shakes itself off right there in the middle of the doorway. Its short fur spikes every which way, and you laugh as you brush your hair from your face. “That deserves a reward; yes it does!” and then you can tell that it’s spied its usual dishes. The milk is cold as always, and steam still curls gently off the sticky grains of rice in the creamy chicken and rice casserole. It had only felt appropriate to remake the first dinner for today.

The weird cat gives you one last look before committing to entering the house, making a beeline for the dishes, and only then do you reach up to shut the door. He’s tracking water all over your kitchen tiles, but you only get whacked once in the face when you reach out to towel him dry. “It’s just me,” you soothe as you tuck him into a warm towel, and he even looks a little contrite as your cheek starts to redden from the force of the hit. You tell him that you’ll get some ice for it and it’ll be right as rain in a day or two, but he still droops a little, and it’s actually really sweet.

You think you might love this weird cat, and isn’t that something? Because you had never loved any Pokémon enough to want to raise one before, yet you had easily devoted several long months to growing attached to one whose species you still don’t know. Maybe you’ll never know. It doesn’t bother you as much as it probably should.

“I’m glad you came,” you tell him, and something that sounds suspiciously like a rusty purr rumbles out of his throat. You wonder if everyone’s first meaningful encounter with Pokémon is like this. You’re warm and dry on your kitchen floor, eating casserole out of mismatched dishes, and your new weird cat sounds like a low-key motorboat figuring out its engines.

It feels amazing. And it only gets better when he lets you lay a tentative hand on his side and give him a little scratch, because his fur is every bit as soft and velveteen as it looks.

“I’m glad you came,” you say again, because you mean it, and your cat— _your cat_ —your new cat who’s large and looks weird and who’ll probably never really figure out this purring business—looks you right in the eyes and rumbles that much harder.

 

 

When you finally introduce yourself to him, he blinks at you like he’s known for a while. Maybe he has. He’s your cat after all. He’s more or less been your cat since he started frequenting your garden way back in February.

And maybe you’re being a bit arrogant, but you like to think that over these few months he’s chosen you just as much as you’ve chosen him. After all he’s your cat, and the thing with cats is that you don’t adopt them so much as they adopt you.

**Author's Note:**

> Mewtwo is a large weird cat and I love him very much. That is all.


End file.
